>
> Doug is correct on this. One of the most unpleasant afternoons
> of my life was spent picking cucumbers in a field with a low
> yield. My back still hurts when I think of it over 60 years later.
Of course, your first day doing physical work after a few years working with only your fingers while sitting in air-conditioning is likely to leave you aching pretty good. Hey, as the Spandex types say, "no pain, no gain," "feel the burn," and all that.
I worked as a land surveyor in the field under the God damned Florida sun for a decade, and all I could think about (when I could think at all, that is, excluding July, August and September) was getting promoted into an air-conditioned office. Then I got promoted and spent the next decade slumped in a chair, typing and clicking, which, while it meant I got to have a lot of fun looking at old maps and writing computer programs, also almost wiped me out. I started getting chest pains, numbness, etc., like I was going to have a heart attack, so I went back out into the field. Now I do about half-and-half, which works out swell nine months out of the year. Working in the sun in July, August and September is still intolerable to a guy raised in Cleveland (I miss snow); this here state is unfit for human occupation during the summer.
What would be good for people's on-the-job health is a certain amount of physical work, but not so much of it that they're exhausted at the end of the day; what they need to stay sharp is enough variety and challenge to fend off boredom, but not so much that their brains are fried afterwards. Yes I do suggest that even high-ranking professionals should occasionally get the opportunity to work up a sweat on the clock.
Of course to realize this utopian idea would require entirely revamping the way employers assign and schedule jobs - in a way that's clearly not 100% compatible with absolute maximization of stockholders's return on investment.
While I'm daydreaming, let's also kill off the idea that everybody needs to go to work and get off work at the same time. That may be necessary when a majority of employees are assembly-line workers, which hasn't been the case for decades. What we achieve nowadays is fifty million workers pissing away two hours of their lives and burning a hundred million gallons of gasoline every day as they wait in traffic jams morning and afternoon five days a week, all because it's far too impossibly hard for office managers to handle the part where John works 7 AM to 4 PM while Mary usually does 9:30 AM to 6:30 PM.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net